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Hi,
Though the kernel driver for Intel wireless 3945 is open source, but it
needs a binary daemon distributed seperately. The daemon enforces legal
regulatory limits . See http://kerneltrap.org/node/6270 for some serious
concerns regarding this. (I mean the idea that open source by its very
nature being deemed unfit for complying to certain legal regulations.)
If you are refering to the debian package hotplug. I do not have that
installed (should I ?). But I do have hotplug capability enabled in the
kernel i.e.
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI=m
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_FAKE=m
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_PCIE=m
I think you may be onto something here. This may be what is causing the
ipw3945 to load prematurely (thank you!). I am not sure how I can turn
it off without getting rid of the hotplug feature (as I'll need it
eventually for my expresscard slot). Looks like this early loading of
the ipw3945 module (without the daemon, bypassing modprobe) prevents
wpasupplicant from working. Since wparoamd find an non-functional
ipw3945 and does nothing. This probably explains why wireless works
on doing :
modprobe -r ipw3945
/etc/init.d/wparoamd stop
/etc/init.d/wparoamd start
The first command actually results in ipw3945 being reloaded, this time
using modprobe (which is correctly configured). I am not sure but I'd
expect wparoamd is what causes it to be immediately reloaded after it is
removed.
The firmware ipw3945.ucode is indeed installed in
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.
I did use update-rc.d to create the symlinks. I was only concerned
if it mattered weather wparoamd started before ifplugd or latter.
Would you know how I can make the kernel hotplug dispatcher
ignore ipw3945 at boot time or else force it to use modprobe
for this purpose ? Linking the above three commands into S99Local would
be an ugly hack :-) I'd like to avoid if possible ?
PS: Wish our debian guru's could figure out a way to automate all
this setup, some day (though I certainly wouldn't expect it with
binary drivers). Oh well!
regards
b thomas
On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:01:46AM -0600, Stefan Srdic wrote:
> B Thomas wrote:
> I'm not sure which binary daemon you are referring too, but I just let
> the hotplug system load the firmware. By the sounds of things, hotplug
> is already loading the kernel module. Maybe try copying your firmware
> image to: /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware and see what happens.
>
> If you need to tweak the rc files use the update-rc.d utility. It is
> much cleaner then manually linking the files.
>
> Stefan
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